Close

Short story category: 5 Minutes

She lay on a sun lounger in the garden, the morning sun wrapping her in its rays and whispering her to sleep. Clear thoughts were transforming into the figures and shadows of dreams. She was about to succumb to the final pull of slumber when a cool darkness blotted out the patterns that had been dan

A wave rolls, like a lumbering seal. The sea is a stretch of grey mounds and I wait for the next one; lazy, easy, barely moving. How I envy it. The water swells like a soft inhalation and yawns up the beach. Sums up Clenton-On-Sea, really. My head’s banging. I got up at the crack of midday, mas

I sit inside and wait for summer to be over. Sometimes I sit upright in bed and read a book. Fully dressed though, as if I were about to go out. It’s all too easy to fall the long, hard way into bad habits. Sometimes I sit in the bath, the water cool on my skin. I light a candle and pretend it is

The old car door closed with its usual bang and she looked along the road. Charlotte was surprised, briefly, by the sight of only two cars along the seafront. She got out the notebook, already bent at the edges and slightly damp from being in the door of the car. She hadn’t planned to use it yet,

I finally explain it to her as we walk by the lake. It’s a warm day. The sun glimmers off the soft waves and throws rippling stripes of colour over the boughs of the trees. Sparrows and moorhens call out over the rhythm of the rocking light. She says she’s heard of it before, but doesn’t qu

Traditions are not consciously created. A tradition is born and nurtured long before anyone sees it for what it is. It lies patiently in wait – for it has time – growing stronger and more difficult to remove. It has no fear of being discovered, for discovery is the final act of consummation. Tra

Jess hadn’t expected snow. Wasn’t that the point of the south-west? Wet, yes, but no snow, not like the Highlands or the Alps or somewhere. When they’d bought their idyll, their adorable little cottage with its roses round the door and windows peeping out beneath thatched eaves, when they’d

My grandmother took the bookies to the cleaners that last Christmas we were all together. They had it coming, she reasoned. She had placed the same bet every January 2nd for the previous seventeen years and never won a penny. The stakes that had begun at five shillings – cobbled together from c